During the time of this article, the instructions on the Ubuntu wiki were pretty light and from what I can see not quite complete. These instructions are currently written for PostgreSQL 8.4.
Installing PostgreSQL
Ensure UTF-8 Encoding is Set
Make sure that your operating system has the right encoding set as explained in the "Select Locale" part of my Ubuntu Linux Base Server article. In the case of my Ubuntu server it was installed with the minimal configuration and was missing the utf-8 locale.
Install
The Ubuntu install is simply,
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That's all there is for the installation. Ubuntu apt-get makes it easy and does all the hard work for you.
Further Details
You might also be interested to know that Ubuntu's apt-get installer does a number of other things you would have had to manually configure if you installed manually,
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| Warning |
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In order to complete this section I need to figure out how to do a configured portable setup of PostgreSQL. |
Initial Setup
Change the Default postgres Database User Account
If you want to manage postgresql outside of the command line, you must change the default password in postgresql.
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Read further for more details on connecting.
Connecting to the Database
GUI Client
Besides the command line interface, I like to be able to manage the database using a remote GUI client.
pgAdmin 3 from www.pgadmin.org
pgAdmin 3 is one of the most popular GUI clients. It is cross platform so I happen to run it on my Windows desktop.
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I find using SSH to be the most secure method. In some cases you may need to allow remote administration.
Server Instrumentation Warning
Note, the very first time I connected with pgAdmin 3 I got a warning on Server instrumentation. I am currently trying to understand if these messages should be addressed or ignored. My gut is saying that I do not need this in a stripped down system. It's most likely nice to have tools for DB admins to get more data.
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